Forever Magazine Issue 12, page 2
part #12 of Forever Magazine Series
Gabriel found the button for the car’s compass. A digital display made the windshield bright. Yes, they were definitely heading downtown. And going faster, too.
“Turn the windows clear,” Gabriel said, “right now.”
The driver laughed and patted the dashboard. ”Nothing to see, mate! Car knows where she’s going. ’Sides, it’s nightshift. All bets off! Let the spirit take you, I like to say.”
The car drove faster. The beat got louder. Now there were whoops and howls, too. The driver gave tuneless accompaniment:
Lullaby, lullaby, where will you go?
Deep into dreamland, where all dreamers go.
“Stop this car,” Gabriel said, leaning forward to hit random buttons.
The windows flickered, blinked, showed polygons flocking by. Then stars and planets, streaks of lightspeed. Fish and water, the Circuit de Monaco. The music changed to Rive-Gauche accordions, industrial metal, a nightclub croon.
The driver laughed, rocking in his ergo-gel carseat.
Lullaby, lullaby, where have you gone?
I’ve gone into dreamland, where all go alone.
“Stop!” Gabriel shouted, and pushed open his door.
An alarm bleated. The car screeched and stopped. ”Please keep all extremities within the vehicle,” it urged in placid baritone, as Gabriel tumbled out into a pile of green trash bags.
By the time Gabriel picked the lettuce shreds from his suit, the driver was standing beside him.
“Here we are, then.” He waxed his mustache from a tin.
“Where?” Gabriel sat up, scanning the dank alley.
The driver pointed to an illuminated steeple, thrusting obelisk-like above the rooftops. ”Church of the Woken Spirit. Services from dusk to dawn. Five blocks off, but this’ll do.” He said with a smile, “I have found the light, my friend—in deepest darkness.”
Gabriel sighed. The man was a Lunie, a worshipper of darkness and the moon, on his way to a nightshift mass. Totally mad. You could never trust a nightshift driver.
“What about your job?” Gabriel shouted, as the driver sauntered, whistling, up the street. ”What about your car? What about me?”
“What about enlightenment?” the driver called back, and added with a thickening of his somewhat put-on British accent, “To be or not to be, that is the answer.”
He turned the corner and was gone.
Taking refuge in the abandoned car, Gabriel managed to call up a map. He was still in the financial district, but that didn’t mean he was safe. The black-marketeers would be abroad soon, conducting deals and trades amid the roots of the skyscrapers. Gabriel already heard hoarse cries, piped on pirated channels through street-level speakers. The pimps were out and about. The sidewalk pirates would soon follow.
Gabriel tried Marisol. No answer. He told his phone to keep trying, passing the time by looking up the phrase that had troubled his mind. Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep. He’d searched for so much music over the years that the online search-bots, wise to his profile, insisted on playing mostly songs. Dumb AIs. Thought they were too smart for user input.
At last, Gabriel found it. The car engaged autoplay. “Sleep no more!” said a scratchy voice, piped across the decades from some old recording, “Macbeth does murder sleep, the innocent sleep; sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care, the death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, chief nourisher in life’s feast!”
Shakespeare. Of course. Not really Gabriel’s cup of tea. Still, there was something to it, wasn’t there? Humanity had murdered sleep, and what did they have to show for it? Twenty-hour workdays, skyrocketing crime. The trouble was, they’d done away with sleep, but they hadn’t managed to do away with the night.
Shouts nearby. Shadows on the wall. Or was it just a wake-up pill hallucination? You could never trust your senses during nightshift, Gabriel had found. Couldn’t trust much of anything, really.
Gabriel’s phone rang, making him gasp. The phone interfaced automatically with the car. Marisol’s face loomed huge in the windshield. “Mari, jeez! You scared me to death.”
“Yeah, I can tell. You look awful. What’s the matter?”
“You delivered me into the arms of a religious nut, that’s what’s the matter.” Gabriel levered back his seat, trying to get a better perspective on Marisol’s huge, down-staring face. “I told you the merc-drivers couldn’t be trusted. They’re all turning into Lunies. I’m downtown. Stranded.”
“In the black market?” Marisol looked alarmed. ”You’d better get out of there. Word is the sidewalk pirates are out in force. They’re already holding three traders for ransom.”
“Well, maybe you could give me some help with that. I need the real thing, Mari. True blue and black. The city’s finest. I need a cop.”
Marisol sighed, closing her eyes. “Even if I go off-book, Gabe, the cops won’t go through the Village. Especially not tonight. There’s some kind of carnival.”
“Another carnival?” Gabriel groaned. Every nightshift, it seemed, the hipsters, pagans, nuts, druggies, freaks, and weirdoes of the Village threw a carnival. “What’s the occasion this time?”
“You’d have to talk to a numerologist. Something to do with the Newgrange tumulus. Runic decipherments. Astral theories. Word around the force is, they’re doing a human sacrifice.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Well, it’s not the real deal. One of those brainless bodies, lab-grown for research. Mount Sinai’s getting rife with ghouls. Half the staff sells meat out the back.”
“Don’t those artsy bums have anything better to do?”
“They’re living the dream, I guess. Party all night. At least it’s good for business.”
The liquor business, Mari meant. And the drug business, and the fast food business. Night was the time of vice, and vice was booming. With wake-up pills, parties around the world had gotten ever longer, wilder, weirder. Were people just bored with their extra time? Or did the dark hours have some power all their own? Maybe the Lunie cults had a point.
“The carnivals are tame,” Marisol said, “compared to what goes on uptown. You should see the police reports. Some of the kids who grew up with these pills? They really believe they’re creatures of the night.”
“I know about the batheads.”
“Oh, no you don’t. Not the half of it. Not till you’ve worked municipal dispatch. The richer they are . . . . We have kids on the Upper East Side . . . Gabriel? Gabe—?”
Marisol’s face fractured, flickered, vanished. A sickly visage coalesced in the windshield. Hollow cheeks, pointed teeth, cigarette-burn eyes.
“Speak of the devil,” Gabriel said.
“Tremble, mortal,” said the vampire. ”Vorgoth has found your signal. Vorgoth has picked up your scent.”
Gabriel groaned. He should have known not to say the word “batheads” on a non-encrypted call. These sickos monitored communications throughout the city, waiting for the unwary to speak flagged keywords. Drop a mention of Nosferatu into a conversation, you could have some jerk in a polyester cape haunting your fire escape for weeks. “Invocation,” the kids called it.
“You have spoken the words of doom, mortal. Now you must face your destiny.”
This particular kid looked young. Preteen-young. Could just be some punk playing dress-up. Or maybe this kid had gotten the surgery, gone all-out. From the way he rolled his r’s, Gabriel guessed he was a newbie.
Thing was, when it came to vampires, the newbies were the dangerous ones.
“Get out of my phone call, bathead.”
“Silence, prey! You speak to a creature of darkness. Denizens of the sunnyside have no rights in my domain.”
“Yeah, sure.” Gabriel pressed the button to end the call. The car gave out an angry chirp.
“Attention. You have attempted to disconnect two conversant devices. Please wait until your devices determine that it’s safe to terminate their connection.”
“Wa-ha-ha,” laughed Vorgoth from the windshield.
“It’s a pirated phone call!” Gabriel shouted at the car. ”Can’t you identify a pirated call? I’m talking to a vampire, here.”
“Correction,” said Vorgoth. ”The vampire is talking to you. Heed well my warning, beast of prey. With the rising of the moon, death shall swoop upon you.”
Gabriel pushed more buttons. Vorgoth, for all his sharp teeth, was small taters. If Gabriel didn’t get moving, the black market would sweep him up. He’d fall prey to the naphthalene lassos of the sidewalk pirates. He’d be kidnapped, held for ransom. He’d miss work.
Sure enough, Gabriel heard shouts, footsteps, a booted troop’s advancing tramp. He popped his head out the window. No sidewalk pirates seemed to be around, but a private security force came goose-stepping around the corner. A ragtag bunch, five men, all wearing red headbands. Every one of them save the leader carried crude tools of urban back-alley abuse: shockprods, billysticks, truncheons, bats.
The leader, an automatic rifle at his hip, marched backwards at the head of the pack. “All right, boys, recon puts our nest at two blocks down. You got the 3-D map, you got the infrared. Now, these are rogue ransomers, remember, small and unequipped, and you know what that means. Unpredictable. We’re talking street-blitzkrieg, overwhelming force, no pulled punches. Their hostage is a property developer, middle-fifties, white male—”
On it went. Gabriel shook his head. These sad street forces always puffed themselves up with military airs. Acting like they were Green Berets, instead of some company’s low-rent mercs.
The security team was nearing Gabriel’s car when another force, bigger and better equipped, appeared at the opposite end of the street. These men wore green uniforms, pants and tunics, low-watt lasers. Gabriel recognized the security crew for Ballen’s, a big ratings firm headquartered downtown.
The green force spanned the street, blocking passage. The red force halted near Gabriel’s car. Trouble at the OK Corral, with Gabriel smack in the center. The wild west, redux. With better guns.
“Look like you kids are lost.” The leader of the green force amplified his voice with a fist-sized mike. “The paintball arenas are out in New Jersey.”
“Eat a dog, Chang,” a red-team member retorted.
The Ballen’s force seemed to be all Vietnamese, while the red force was a motley mix. Gabriel wasn’t surprised. A lot of these private forces had degenerated into gangs. After the wake-up pill revolution, with employees working day and night, it took half as many people to do the same work. Folks lost their jobs; unemployment broke fifty percent. Some of the rejects had turned to porn, some to drink, and most of the rest of them turned into crooks. City police couldn’t handle the extra load, so private companies compensated with private forces. And human nature wouldn’t be what it was, Gabriel supposed, if it hadn’t taken all of a few years for those private forces to turn into clannish, territorial mobs.
“These are Ballen’s corners.” Green leader drummed his fingers on the holster of his gun. “We are the only police on these streets.”
“Then you ain’t doing your jobs,” red leader replied. “We tracked a hostage to your turf, Fu Man Chu. Got some sidewalk pirates holding our boy, just down the block. Now, are you gonna help us take him home, or are we gonna open some skulls?”
“Give us the address. We will save him for you.”
“And pick up the bounty? Hell to that.”
Something unspoken passed between the two men. Green leader smiled. Red leader scowled.
“Don’t tell me you’re in on this, Won-ton.”
“A thousand per head,” the green leader said, “to come into our territory. Will you pay?”
So the green security team and the pirates were in league. Again, Gabriel wasn’t exactly shocked. It was a typical scam, security teams in cahoots with sidewalk pirates. The red gang surely pulled the same stunt on their own turf.
Both teams were tense, now, fingering their weapons. Gabriel doubted the red team had the moolah to pay their way onto the green team’s turf. He also doubted this confrontation would end in hugs.
“Is the sheep anxious?” said Vorgoth from the windshield. “Is the sheep afraid?”
“Oh, shut up.” Gabriel jabbed dashboard buttons.
The car was still playing Shakespeare quotes. “To be or not to be,” a fuzzy voice said, “that is the question.”
“Not to be,” Vorgoth elected, and laughed.
The red security team advanced, shockprods ready. “We’ll see how well you Commies bluff.”
Commies. An odd insult, it seemed to Gabriel. If anything, the Ballen’s security team was a bit too entrepreneurial.
“To die,” said the voice from the dashboard, “to sleep; no more; and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to . . . . ”
Sleep no more. Macbeth hath murdered sleep.
“To die,” Vorgoth overrode the canned quotes, “‘tis a consummation, sheep, devoutly to be wished.”
The two rogue forces converged on the car.
To die, to sleep . . .
“Rods at the ready, boys!”
“Phasers out!”
To sleep, to be . . .
It clicked.
“To be or not to be,” Gabriel said, imitating the escort’s British accent. “That is the answer.” He punched the cars buttons. Nought. The British said nought for zero.
2-B-R-0-2-B.
“Override engaged,” the car intoned.
Gabriel hit the power button. The engine grumbled. He couldn’t get his phone call to disconnect, but once he hit the gas, the car shrank Vorgoth’s face to a tiny inset. The car bucked forward. Gabriel steered onto the sidewalk, around the red security team. Trash bags thumped and farted under the wheels. He swerved, scraping a wall.
“Run, sheep, run,” Vorgoth chortled. “The hunt begins!”
Green light flashed in the street behind. Were the security teams shooting at him, or at one another? Gabriel rounded a corner on screeching wheels. He hadn’t driven a car since he was a student, before wake-up pills, before mass unemployment, before night shifts and Lunie cults and a world of unintended consequences. He remembered puttering in his old Saipa around the Kinshasa university, dreaming of international finance, venture capital, innovation, the bright rich future.
Amazing how old skills came back, when a man was running for his life.
3: The Mighty Ram
Eleven o’clock PM. The city bright and alive. Under the barricades of the Chinatown compound, Gabriel huddled with his phone.
“Mari? You there?”
The Lunie cabbie’s car was a twist of steel, partially wrapped around a concrete pylon. Gabriel always got twitchy while driving with a wake-up pill high. He’d run a merry chase through the downtown streets, scanning the alleys for batwing shadows, Vorgoth goading him from the windshield. At Canal street, Gabriel had lost control. Vorgoth’s pale face had disappeared in a spray of glass.
Thank God for airbags. Gabriel wrapped a Band-Aid around his bleeding thumb.
“Gabes?” Marisol’s image came in startlingly clear. “Signal’s great. Where are you?”
“Outside Chinatown. I had to ditch the car.”
“Is that it behind you? That mashed-up wreck?”
“You know me and parallel parking.” Gabriel absently kicked a rearview mirror. “At least I could have picked a worse place to crash. Always a hotspot here.”
He glanced up at Chinatown’s radiant towers. Twelve-foot ramparts shielded their splendor from the streets. Conversant in the language of the far side of the globe, the immigrants of this neighborhood had profited from round-the-clock corporate schedules. By day, by night, they kept up cross-hemisphere contact, doing business with the market maestros of Shanghai. Transcending the outdated day-night distinction had made them disproportionately rich.
“Dear, dear,” Marisol said, managing to look at once worried and distracted. “You look all right. Do you feel all right?”
“Ask me again when the rush wears off.”
“You’ve got another rush coming,” Marisol said. “If you’re feeling up to it. I found you an escort. A bona fide cop.”
Gabriel suppressed a whoop.
“He’s ninth precinct,” Marisol said. “He knows the Village like a tactical map. He’s agreed to take you as far as the park.”
“What’s his price?”
“You’ll have to take that up with him.”
“Where do I meet him?”
“Zoner’s Alley.”
Gabriel groaned.
“It’s the best I could do. At least it’s close by.” That distracted look came into Mari’s face again, like she’d suddenly become aware of dark forces around them. “Hey? Gabes? Tell me something.”
“Fire away.”
“This mystery market event. This AI bubble. It’s all over the news. The bot Pamplona, they’re calling it: robo-bulls chasing humanity down the street. They say all the inside players are running long, buying like gangbusters from the loan brokers.”
“What about it?”
“You have any idea what it might be?”
“I know what you know.” Gabriel shrugged. “The AI modelers are onto something. Or they think they are. Predicting a biblically huge event.”
“Like an interest rate change?”
Gabriel laughed. “No, God, bigger. Way bigger. AIs aren’t like the human quants, Mari. Not likely to bite the bait of some little number dangled by a government bank. They think big picture. Society wide.” Her frightened face worried him. “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know.” Marisol kneaded her neck. “The emergency lines are on fire tonight. It’s wild. Networks are down. I heard the mayor’s meeting with his cabinet. Even the president issued a statement.”
